Happy 4th of July! If you don’t buy my book, you don’t love America. This may seem to be a rather assertive push but hear me out.

Christmas in Pandemonium takes place in Pandemonium, South Carolina, an imaginary town on the east coast of the United States founded by Satanists in the year 1620. That’s intentionally the same year that Plymouth was founded, so Pandemonium is for the Satan-worshipping Witches what Massachusetts was for the Puritans, Pennsylvania was for the Quakers, and Maryland was for Catholics. They are taken there by a group of disreputable pirates, whom the Witches call “Strangers.” That’s also from the Mayflower, as the crew that took the Pilgrims to Plymouth was the same. Later, after the Witches and Strangers found the town, a Portuguese ship with African slaves comes by and sells its “passengers” to the Witches. These African slaves become known as the “Fieldhands” after they are converted to Christianity by a freeman in the 18th Century. After the Civil War, the last community of Pandemonium immigrates there in the 1890s: the Ze’ev, a group of Jewish werewolves from Czechia.

So, Pandemonium is like America. You have the two founding communities: the Witches, who come to America for religious liberty, and the Strangers, the pirates who bring them there for a profit. The Witches are like the Pilgrims of Plymouth and the Strangers are like the entrepreneurs who started Jamestown. Also, the Witches later become lackadaisical and replace human sacrifice with the crushing of a bug, while the Strangers morph into Christians after seeing the Witches commit a human sacrifice. It’s kind of like how the North started out as more religious, being founded by very uptight Calvinists, while the South was more entrepreneurial. Then the two switched over time. The Fieldhands are African slaves, and they suffer the same injustices black people suffered in American history, albeit with the odd twist of being enslaved by people who practiced Satanic rituals in private. The Ze’ev are a prototypical “second wave” immigration group that came to America in the late 1890s.

The community evolves with America, beginning with being a town with a Line going down the middle and you had to stay on your side of the Line, to embracing religious freedom after the America Revolution, to the emancipation of the Fieldhands after the Civil War, the full equality for every group in the wake of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. The novel takes place in modern day where Pandemonium is a town not unlike the rest of America, other than the one vampire in town who can walk up walls and the Jewish werewolves.

Pandemonium is a parable of America, so if you don’t buy my book, you hate America. Now, I can imagine one objection. What? No, that objection isn’t that you don’t hate America just because you don’t buy a book published in Canada that most people have never heard of. The hypothetical objection is that maybe you actually do hate America. Let’s say you’re a commie. Should you buy my book anyway? Yes, most definitely. Why? Well, it’s published in Canada, and there’s no better way to show contempt for America than buying something from those maple-syrup-chugging Kanucks from the north. Canada’s like an anti-America. It even has French-speaking people.

Whether you love America or hate it, you should buy Christmas in Pandemonium. Please do. My ego depends upon it.